Kimmie
The cloth on the trestle table has a crease straight down the middle of it, and I have now smoothed it flat eleven times, but it’s still there.
I shouldn’t have folded it into quarters and left it in a box for two weeks like a woman who has never met an iron in her life.
I know I’m overthinking it. Not one person coming through that door in four hours is going to look at a table and think, well, the crease has ruined it for me, I was going to buy the Rebecchi but the linen has let it down.
I smooth it again anyway.
Then I go around the room with my clipboard and read my own handwriting back to myself like it belongs to somebody more competent than me. Fruit out of the refrigerator by ten. Cheese boards at half past. Wine open at eleven, except the sparkling, which is mine.
“You have done everything,” I tell the room out loud. My voice makes the space feel less enormous. “The lights are right. The cards are straight. The floor is clean.”
The floor.
I go back to the clipboard so fast I nearly take the corner off the plinth with my hip, which would send Marianne’s stoneware into the wall and give me an entirely different problem to think about. Honestly, at this point, I’d consider it a kindness.
There’s a knock on the glass just after seven, the door opens, and both of them have to come through it one at a time because they don’t fit any other way.
Jasper has five trays balanced along one forearm like a man who has never dropped anything in his life.
Natan has the other five held flat against his chest. He’s wearing a black shirt with the sleeves pushed up, and my entire face goes hot in the time it takes him to close the door with his shoulder.
Great. Wonderful. Twenty-four years old and I have the emotional regulation of a stovetop.
“Morning Kimmie,” Jasper says.
“Morning! Hi. Good morning to you both. The basket, the big basket, the shallow one in the middle of the table, that’s for those, or the boards if they don’t fit, although the boards are for the cheese, so probably the basket.
” I put my hand on the table and then take it off again.
“Thank you. Sincerely. You have no idea.”
“Delilah’s orders,” Jasper says.
Natan sets his trays down in one movement, no wobble, no rattle, and starts lifting the wax paper off. “There’s a lot of pastries here.”
“Well...” I trail off and ignore the way his forearms flex. “Everyone loves a sweet pastry, right?”
“Delilah is still watching us,” Jasper says.
“She counted them twice,” Natan says.
I smile, but it feels tight on my face. “Sounds like she was being thorough.”
“It was a threat,” he says, completely flat, and Jasper snorts.
I laugh too, and it comes out about a third of a note too high, and I turn away and busy myself with the basket so that neither of these men can watch my face do whatever it’s currently doing to give me away.
The pastries are still warm. The smell of them fills the whole gallery in about four seconds, cinnamon and butter over the top of lemon floor cleaner and turpentine.
I banish the thought of the floor out of my head as quickly as it arrives.
This is what it smells like on the morning I open, and I want to remember it. Only I know I won’t, because there is only one thing in my head today and it isn’t cinnamon.
He’s looking at me. I know he’s looking at me because I can feel it on the side of my face. I keep arranging pastries int the basket, and I say, “It’s going to be a wonderful day. The light’s perfect. Isn’t the light perfect?”
“Did you sleep?” Natan asks.
“Like the dead,” I say, to a cinnamon swirl. I stack the last of the now empty trays and hand them back to Natan.
There’s a pause. Jasper, who I am beginning to understand misses nothing, has wandered off toward the long wall and is standing in front of the Rebecchi with his hands in his pockets, giving us the room in the least subtle way ever.
“Kimmie,” Natan says.
“Eleven o’clock.” I flash him a smile with all of my teeth in it. “Come back at eleven, both of you, bring everyone, there’s wine and cheese. Thank you for the pastries. Thank Delilah. Thank Sammie. Thank the cats.”
He watches me for another second. Then he nods once, and picks up the empty trays.
At the door he stops. He looks at the floor beside my desk, for long enough that I feel it in my knees, and then he looks back at me.
“Good luck today,” he says.
The door closes. Through the glass I watch the two of them cross the street, Jasper saying something, Natan not answering.
Here is the thing about last night.
I haven’t slept. Not a single second. I went home at ten, I put on a face mask, I lay in my bed with the blackout blind down and the fan on, and at three in the morning I was staring at the ceiling with my hand pressed flat over my sternum, replaying the sound he made when he came, which is apparently just something my brain can do now, on demand, at will, forever.
At half past three I remembered that neither of us stopped to think about anything, and I did some brisk mental gymnastics about where I am in my cycle and the fact I’ve had a full panel done since the great and terrible era of Craig.
Then I noticed that I was completely calm about it, and that lack of panic was somehow more alarming than panicking would have been.
And now it’s seven twenty on the biggest morning of my professional life, and I am standing in the room where it happened.
I can see it. That’s the problem. I look at my desk and I see my heels braced on the edge of it. I look at the floor and I see the exact place where I obviously lost my mind, and I have to walk past it approximately nine hundred times today while talking people about brushwork.
I’m so annoyed with myself. Six artists trusted me with twenty-two pieces of their hearts.
Bea is going to arrive at half past ten looking mysterious in the corner.
Some collector from the city has emailed me twice about her painting.
I should be thinking about that, and instead I’m thinking about a man’s hands on my thighs.
But underneath the annoyance there’s this other thing, and it’s been sitting there since about four this morning, and I don’t fully know what to do with it.
I didn’t hold my stomach in. Not once. I didn’t apologize for my body or angle myself into the shape I used to make myself into with Craig, who once told me I was a lot, in a voice that made it clear he didn’t mean a lot of anything good.
I took my bra off in front of a man in a bright room and he said fuck like it had been dragged out of him.
I talked. I told him to breathe. I told him to open his eyes, and he did, and he kept them on me.
For thirty-five minutes on this floor I was completely, entirely, embarrassingly myself, and it turned out that was the version he wanted.
I push off the door and go to the desk. His card is still sitting there against my stack of label cards, plain white with a cell number and nothing else. I pick it up and slide it into the back of my phone case.
And it’s only then, standing in the middle of my own gallery, two hours from the doors opening, with cinnamon in the air and the crease still in the tablecloth, that I remember he never gave me my underwear back.